I am looking into setting up a KnoppMyth box with a Hauppauge 350 card in it. However, I am wondering about the hardware required to watch, record, and play back TV in a no-monitor setting; i.e. all of the display is on the TV. Now, I have several hardware setups to choose from here at home. One is a less powerful Pentium II based system, which I would prefer to use; however, I'm not sure it would be fast enough to handle the demands placed on it even with the hardware MPEG-2 encoder the chip features. The other is my gaming PC, which I never actually game on (ironic, isn't it?). It's got an Athlon 2200+ in it, with 512 MB of RAM.

Assuming both would work with KnoppMyth and MythTV, will the slower machine be enough to watch/record/playback TV?

I apologize if I should have searched better; all I've done is read the stickies in here, which seemed to be the most appropriate section for this question.

Well, the PVR 350 offloads both MPEG2 encoding and MPEG2 decoding quite nicely. I've got one in a slot A athlon AMD800 at my vac cabin and have cycles to spare, so it might be enough. At my home I had a slave backend in a PII-350 for a while which had a HD3000 tuner in it with no problem. The only thing I can think to worry about would be is it able to run mysql for the mythfilldatabase and can it flag commercials fast enough.